DNA research performed on samples gather from the Tyrolean Iceman (5300 years old) showed that Ötzi the ice mummy had brown eyes, brown hair and was lactose intolerant.

When comparing Ötzi's genome they found out that the most similar living humans can be found on Sardinia and Corsica.

See the paper "New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman's origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing": http://goo.gl/44b03

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Being able to get your daily intake of energy from your coffee – I see massive potential 😉

One a more serious note. The following seems like a valid point although I think it's quite tricky to find out and decide if part of a sequence is contamination or that it's bacterial sequence that has moved in by gene transfer.

"Rose thinks that more examples of HGT could come from DNA sequencing projects. Bioinformatics software is usually programmed to remove sequences from eukaryotic genomes it deems as "contaminating" DNA, he notes, including sequences that seem to be bacterial. So it is possible that some genetic sequences in higher organisms that originated in bacteria are being thrown out by current sequencing efforts, he says."

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Bacterial gene helps coffee beetle get its fix : Nature News & Comment
Rare example of gene transfer that provides clear evolutionary benefit.

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After SOPA and PIPA now also the Research Works Act (RWA) is doomed to fail because of online public pressure. Today even Elsevier withdrawn themselves from backing this bill making it to die soon! I guess great job done by +Michael B. Eisen and others!

Does this mean that this year the online protestor is following up last years offline protestor as +TIME Person of the Year?

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We won the Battle of the Research Works Act. Now let’s win the War for Open Access.
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things

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Loves the way how easy it has become to add/remove music from his Android phone by using Google Music. By having all my music in the cloud I can just stream it when having wifi/3g connectivity but you can also preload music/playlists for always available offline. It make moving around music so much nicer as I don't have to mount my phone's SD-card anymore and then manually move files to my phone!

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Google Music – Set your music free.
Google Music makes music discovery, purchase, and listening effortless and fun. Store your entire collection for free, and access it instantly on the web or your mobile devices.

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Though I'm still not sure if even a billion would be sufficient to do anything like what he's proposing to do – making a proper computermodel of the brain.

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Computer modelling: Brain in a box : Nature News & Comment
Henry Markram wants €1 billion to model the entire human brain. Sceptics don't think he should get it.

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After reading this article in the Guardian today (http://goo.gl/cEsiV) I found this amazing cartoon from +Nature News & Comment showing briefly how this amazing piece of food technology is done. Growing meat sounds like a proper solution for a growing world population that doesn't like stop eating huge quantities of meat!

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